Data Management Glossary
Microsoft Azure
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and set of on-demand services provided by Microsoft, including virtual machines, cloud storage, databases, cloud analytics, and more. From the Microsoft website:
The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.
Azure supports a variety of programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. It is designed to be flexible and scalable, allowing users to pay only for the services they use and adjust their resources as needed.
With trends like digital transformation, data center consolidation and DevOps adoption in the enterprise, a growing number of organizations are planning to (or in the midst of) migrate on-premises applications and infrastructure to the cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure to create and deploy web applications and APIs and store and analyze data. Cloud service provider platforms like Microsoft Azure are also popular among developers who use it to build and test applications, collaborate with other developers, and deploy code to the cloud.
Azure Storage
Azure Storage is a cloud-based storage service provided by Microsoft. It is designed to provide scalable and highly-available storage for data, files, and unstructured data, such as images, videos, and documents.
Azure Storage provides four types of storage services:
- Blob Storage: Blob storage is designed to store large unstructured data such as documents, images, videos, and logs.
- File Storage: File storage is a fully managed file share service that enables customers to migrate their on-premises file shares to the cloud, but requires the right path to the cloud.
- Queue Storage: Queue storage provides messaging capabilities between different components of a distributed application.
- Table Storage: Table storage is a NoSQL key-value store that can be used to store massive amounts of structured data.
Azure Storage provides features such as automatic replication, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and access control to ensure the security and availability of data. It can be accessed through REST APIs or SDKs for various programming languages. Azure Storage also integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Web Apps, and Azure Functions.
